Focal striatum lesions impair cautiousness in humans.

Functional neuroimaging data indicate the dorsal striatum is engaged when people are required to vary the cautiousness of their decisions, by emphasizing the speed or accuracy of responding in laboratory-based decision tasks. However, the functional contribution of the striatum to decision making is unknown. In the current study we tested patients with focal ischemic lesions of the dorsal striatum and matched non-lesion control participants on a speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) task.

Early evidence affects later decisions: why evidence accumulation is required to explain response time data.

Models of decision making differ in how they treat early evidence as it recedes in time. Standard models, such as the drift diffusion model, assume that evidence is gradually accumulated until it reaches a boundary and a decision is initiated. One recent model, the urgency gating model, has proposed that decision making does not require the accumulation of evidence at all.

Bromocriptine does not alter speed-accuracy tradeoff.

Being quick often comes at the expense of being accurate. This speed-accuracy tradeoff is a central feature of many types of decision making. It has been proposed that dopamine plays an important role in adjusting responses between fast and accurate behavior.

Observed and self-experienced conflict induce similar behavioral and neural adaptation.

In adapting our behavior to a rapidly changing environment, we also tune our behavior to that of others. To investigate the neural bases of such adaptive mechanisms, we examined how individuals adjust their actions after decision-conflicts observed in others compared to self-experienced conflicts. Participants responded to the color of a stimulus, while its spatial position elicited either a conflicting or a congruent action.

The Lantern: an ultra-light micro-drive for multi-tetrode recordings in mice and other small animals.

In vivo electrophysiological recordings from groups of distinguishable neurons in behaving mice is a technique with a rapidly growing appeal, particularly because it can be combined with gene targeting techniques. This methodology is deemed essential for achieving a flexible and versatile coupling of molecular-genetic manipulations with behavioral and system level analyses of the nervous system. One major obstacle in obtaining this technological integration is the relatively high weight and bulk size of the available implantable devices for ensemble recordings as compared to the size of the animal.

Your conflict matters to me! Behavioral and neural manifestations of control adjustment after self-experienced and observed decision-conflict.

In everyday life we tune our behavior to a rapidly changing environment as well as to the behavior of others. The behavioral and neural underpinnings of such adaptive mechanisms are the focus of the present study. In a social version of a prototypical interference task we investigated whether trial-to-trial adjustments are comparable when experiencing conflicting action tendencies ourselves, or simulate such conflicts when observing another player performing the task.